There are three gigantic sources of waste in the US: healthcare, military spending and education. All of them are 1) run by large organizations with growing bureaucracies, 2) considered so important that any expense is justified, 3) heavily subsidized or financed with loans or insurance, so growing costs are always met 4) in a position where the bureaucracy decides how much should be spent, not the end consumer. In other words, the school decides its students need $300 text books, or to raise rates $1k to fund new buildings and programs. Same with hospitals: the last hospital I was at had a grand piano and robots roaming the hallway. Politicians don't want to be seen cutting defense spending, so the military bureaucracy decides how much to spend, and when there's money left at the end of the year they always find a way to spend it. I'm not sure how we should fix it, but I'd imagine we either have to increase pressure on these institutions to save money by drying up their endless source of revenue, or take the purchasing decisions out of their hands and back into the hands of consumers.

Although I can appreciate the comparison in terms of amount of money in each, I don't know there is tremendous waste in all three, or that the source of expense is the same in all three.

What they do have in common is being seen as indispensible or essential services. I agree they also all have tremendous bureaucracies.

For example, I think one primary source of costs in healthcare (strangely almost completely unaddressed in the current healthcare law debates) is lack of competition. Licensing laws and government regulation over procedures and whatnot stifles effective choices in healthcare.

There are many other problems too, like lack of transparency over pricing, and an inversion of the normal economic decision-making process (for example, instead of the buyer having fixed costs and benefits to choose between, they are often at best only given the option of accepting or refusing the service).

Education is a bit different, IMHO. There, you have businesses using degrees as checklist criteria and pushing off real training onto schools; schools have become administratively topheavy. Rather than being faculty-driven, they're increasingly administratively-driven (it's not uncommon to have several deans of a given college, for example). States, which have historically funded universities in the public interest, are cutting that funding and pushing costs onto students.

I guess my point is that I don't really see the solutions being the same, nor do I see simply cutting funding and "starving the beast" as the right solution. Education is already underfunded, and what tends to happen is that administrators cut other positions over their own, or over relinquishing decision-making authority to democratic processes.

Too much discussion has focused on who pays for healthcare, and in what way, or how much. It's important but not really helpful in the long-term, because the real problems are in transparency and overregulation. It's ridiculous, for example, to assume that citizens can take responsibility for their own healthcare if the government explicitly prevents people doing just that: by preventing them from making their own healthcare decisions, preventing competition, and raising regulatory hurdles to new services (e.g., in the form of drug regulation, overly strict laws about who can provide what service, and what hospitals and manufacturers must do). So we end up with a system where you can't refill a harmless medication you've used for years without getting approval of an overpaid provider, but can get a harmful opiate from that same provider when another service (from a different type of provider) would be more helpful.

The amount of money being spent in these areas is not really the problem; it's a symptom. Just cutting spending on them will not really address the problems, and may make them worse.

Because they can and they want to make money (even the non-profits). There's no other way to justify a 3x increase in tuition over 10-15 yrs. Teacher's salaries have stagnated or dropped (due to use of adjuncts) and course material costs have effectively gone to zero (most materials are available on the Internet so the only excuse for $300 books now is greed or very esoteric subjects). That's why I refuse to donate to my alma mater. They have more than enough money. They have an unlimited, endless supply of money coming in from these federal loan programs, and they increase tuition to tap into more and more of it. It's a never ending cycle of making money off of students while offering the least amount of education possible.

This is what a society that doesn't value education in the least looks like. Instead of figuring out how to educate our population, we're too busy figuring out how to prevent people from pursuing education because most people are just too stupid for college by the time they reach college age. And why wouldn't they be, considering that in our best public schools, they just spent 12 years being babysat and learning almost nothing?

They charge an exorbitant fee because tuition is being heavily subsidized. The consequences of this exact policy change being discussed is a form of removing part of that subsidy.

> Sometimes I do wonder why American Universities charge exorbitant tuition fee?

Because American universities are viewed as institutions under the control of a "hippie class", and academics are viewed as "prissy" and "elite". It's a class hatred of the educated, combined with a desire for power over the working class in the form of loan repayments.

> Sometimes I do wonder why American Universities charge exorbitant tuition fee?

Students demand a lot. Good profs. Dorms with AC. Sports teams. Medical care.

All that cost a lot.

States and federal gov't pays less each year. The difference has to come from somewhere?

In any case, its not perfect but I will take US colleges 100x over Japanese Colleges or Chinese Colleges or Mexican Colleges or 98% of the colleges in the world.

I went to university in 2008. We did not have dorms with AC. The dorm I lived in was built in the 40s or 50s. Tuition (no relation to dorm costs) was still rising rapidly. Now my alma mater has new dorms with AC, but they cost far more than the older dorms (which are still available). Tuition has continued to rise since then, albeit more gradually.

My university did not provide free medical care. Professor quality has not quantifiably improved over that time.

Have sports team costs increased so rapidly in the last 10-15 years?

Even if US colleges are better than 98% of the world (which I doubt, it seems like you conveniently forgot Canada, Europe, Australia, etc.) employers are mostly using that degree as a box tick. Convincing students they need the exhorbitantly priced best when they really don't still seems predatory to me.

Personally I paid the equivalent of 16kUSD for a 4 year software degree in New Zealand, and my fortune 500 employer seems fine with it. A foreigner would have to pay double, but that's still far from US prices.

There is a big range. You can get a 4 year "software degree" from a community college in the US for no more than 20k USD. Most of the big numbers you see toted are for private university, or giant flagship campuses. Many schools do offer cheaper deals at the smaller campuses. Don't buy the hype that any college degree in the US cost $200k.

This seems to be based on some misinformation. Tuition only covers a small portion of a university's costs. The rest is made up by endowments, grants, donations, and other sources.

People have been going to college in this country for a long time and only relatively recently has the outstanding amount of loans and those in delinquency have shot up. I have a hard time believing the reason is having good professors and air conditioning.

I bet they'd gladly pay $10'000 less per year even if it meant no $100M football stadium.

If you read my posts further down, Football is one of the only net positives for most universities. So getting rid of Football may raise your tuition by $500.

Now if you got rid of swimming, lacrosse, cross country, track, cricket, etc. etc., that would lower tuition by a bit.

>Students demand a lot. Good profs. Dorms with AC. Sports teams. Medical care.

Why would you expect your university to provide dorms for you? This whole living on campus thing on Anglo universities was always weird to me. You'd only expect perks like that if you pay thousands of dollars a semester. Also Re:"Medical care": That's what universal health care is for.

> Why would you expect your university to provide dorms for you

Traditionally, you go to school hundreds or thousands of miles away from your family. You need someplace to stay, no? Growing up in a city and you will have much more options to "live at home"

> That's what universal health care is for

The US does not have universal health care. So not sure what you are saying, how could a university not charge for something that is required and not provided elsewhere?

>Traditionally, you go to school hundreds or thousands of miles away from your family. You need someplace to stay, no?

I still don't see why it's the university that has to provide this.

>The US does not have universal health care.

Well, there's your problem

The university gives students access to cheaper housing than they could find on their own. Not sure how that is any different from say, providing electricity for the classrooms. You need both electricity and a place to sleep to attend school no?

> Well, there's your problem

Sure, but that isn't going to change anytime soon. Just giving up on any problem because "whelp, no universal healthcare" is not a productive way to live life.

Sports teams are generally a net positive. You and I see the $3.5M salary for a football coach at a public university and think it's absurd, but the football program itself pulls in tons of cash directly and indirectly and is probably more than 'worth it' to the school overall.

edit: Looks like this is generally wrong. I'll leave it up but see below comment.

I hear that sound byte (bite?) here a lot. It does not seem to be true based on the news I read. Perhaps you have better sources than I. From what I see, 20 out of 1,083 NCAA schools made money on sports. The other 1,063 lost money.

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...

  Only 24 FBS schools generated more revenue than they 
  spent in 2014, according to the NCAA Revenues and 
  Expenses of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs 
  Report. That figure jumped from 20 schools in 2013, but  
  it has remained relatively consistent through the past 
  decade.

Don't forget to account for scholarships. You are giving free tuition to the football team, ladies soccer team, lacrosse team, ladies cross country, swimming, etc. etc. etc.

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/ji...

  Only two sports were profitable at FBS schools, according 
  to the report. Football programs netted a median profit 
  of slightly more than $3 million and men’s basketball 
  netted a median $340,000. But the profits at most schools 
  quickly vanished after paying for a long list of other 
  intercollegiate teams, all of which lose money. The 
  median loss among of athletic departments was $11.6 million.

Hey, that's news to me. I heard this in terms of specifically the UC schools' major sports endeavors, so maybe it's still true there, but thanks for the sources.